The Book of Hard Things Farrar Straus Giroux Oct. 2003 isbn: 0374115591 $22.00 Other Books by Sue Halpern

Harvard Book Store Author Series Presents:

Harvard Book Store is pleased to announce that on Thursday, November 6th Sue Halpern will be reading from The Book of Hard Things, a provocative first novel that explores the porous borders between friendship, sex and love by a writer who, according to the Los Angles Times, is “uncommonly gifted and compassionate …expansive, original, exploratory.”

At eighteen, Cuzzy Gage has never been out of Poverty, the isolated mountain hamlet where he was born, raised, and--much to the annoyance of his dreamy girlfriend, the mother of his child--seems destined to stay. Then he meets Tracy Edwards, and as Tracy introduces Cuzzy to poetry and literature and music, he in turn is exposed to the natural world, to a place of granite and schist and other, enduring, hard things. But in a small town their unlikely friendship is inevitably the focus of scrutiny and debate, a debate that ends as no one could have imagined, and makes each of them, in their own way, confront the hardest thing of all.

Sue Halpern

Author Biography:

Sue Halpern writes frequently for The New York Review of Books and is the author of two previous nonfiction books. She lives in Vermont with her husband, Bill McKibben.